'Design for mid-market & extend it to enterprise'

Suresh Vaswani, 52, believes in looking at the future. The past doesn’t focus him much, so understandably he’s most unwilling to talk of his quarter decade at Wipro, especially the last few months. Equally, he is very vocal and uses phrases like “very exciting, solid, great fun, fantastic and it’s all good” to describe his year-plus stint at Dell heading its applications and BPO business globally.
This personal philosophy syncs perfectly with the mantra at Dell to look at the future. Says Vaswani, “We have to manage the past, but orientation should be how are you migrating the customer for the future and how you are taking the customer to newer business models leveraging next generation solutions and services.”
He’s lost weight since leaving Wipro. Not because of the circumstances surrounding the exit or the pressures of the new job, but because he’s figured that the only way to beat the monstrous travel he does now is by staying very fit with serious exercise. In fact, he will be bit disappointed if you don’t notice the leaner look.
The two weeks in India and two in the US every month is because his is a “global job based out of India”. All the verticals are abroad while the service lines are here as are most centres of excellence.
Vaswani finds “working at a senior, strategic level at a company like Dell very interesting. It is a good move, a good change. It’s very, very exciting being part of a company of this size which can actually move the market. You don’t have the follower mentality but a leader mentality here. It feels good being part of key management of Dell, being one of the few Indians at that level”.
Dell, which was best known for its hardware, is transforming itself into a full-fledged IT solutions company. That’s where the services leg — which is an over $8-billion business for Dell — becomes critical.
The applications and BPO business of the company which Vaswani manages came to Dell from the Perot acquisition. The thrust here is on the mid-market. The strategy is to “design the product to address the mid-market and extend it to address the enterprise”, says Vaswani. The focus is three verticals: health care, BFSI and retail & manufacturing. Mobility and cloud being other areas of major interest.
When he took over the business, his mandate was three-fold. To create a vision for the business and align it with Dell’s. To build a solid team, ingrain the mid-market design philosophy and have a model that addressed all segments of the market. The second was to leverage India for Dell globally, be it services, internal ops, analytics or R&D.
Dell’s services business globally has 44,000 people of whom about 15,000 are in India. Vaswani calls it “balanced shoring.” He wants to “leverage India more so you will see that base increasing.”
Lots of Wiproites followed Vaswani to Dell, including some senior functionaries, making him a not very popular figure at Wipro’s sprawling headquarters at Sarjapur in Bangalore. Quiz him on that and he will only offer, ‘What can I say?” with a smile.
No conversation with Vaswani can be complete without wanting to know what exactly happened in the last few months of his Wipro stint. He isn’t keen, saying, “So much has been said.” When you point out that he said nothing, he laughs admitting, “Yeah, we just dropped dead and resurfaced in new avatars.” ‘We’ being him and the other joint CEO, Girish Paranjpe, both of whom walked out quietly last January when Wipro chairman, Azim Premji, decided he wanted a new face in the CEO suite.
When pressed he insists, “It’s too much of the past. 16 months is a long time.” All he will cede is, “Wipro was a long, great stint. One can discount the last couple of months.”
When not working or traveling, Vaswani likes to hit the greens for a round of golf with his buddies which doesn’t happen as often as he would like. He loves music. “There’s a musician inside me. But he’s not coming out,” he ends with a big laugh.